The Federal Fat Police:Bill Would Require Government to Track Body Mass of American Children

Thursday, May 13, 2010 By Penny Starr, Senior Staff Writer

(CNSNews.com) - A bill introduced this month in Congress would put the federal and state governments in the business of tracking how fat, or skinny, American children are.

The will would require states that receive federal dollars for health programs to track the Body Mass Index of children ages 2 through 18 annually through records collected by their health care providers. The legislation also requires the states to pass that data on to the Department of Health and Human Services for analysis.

The Healthy Choices Act--introduced by Rep. Ron Kind (D-Wis.), a member of the House Ways and Means Committee--establishes and funds a wide range of programs and regulations aimed at reducing obesity rates by such means as putting nutritional labels on the front of food products, subsidizing businesses that provide fresh fruits and vegetables, and collecting BMI measurements of patients and counseling those that are overweight or obese.

In Section 101, the bill amends the Public Health Services Act by adding BMI as a measurement that health care professionals must assess annually on all patients and specifically for all children who are in federally funded health programs such as SCHIP.

The providers then report the data to the state or other entity (i.e., tribal authorities or health officials in the District of Columbia), which then will give the data collected over several years to the federal government for analysis.

The bill is H.R. 5209, The Healthy Communities Through Helping to Offer Incentives and Choices to Everyone in Society Act of 2010, was introduced on May 5, 2010 by REPRESENTATIVE RONALD KIND, D-WI. It was referred to the House Transportation and Infrastructure committee, then to the House Natural Resources committee, and finally to the Subcommittee on Highways and Transit where it is now. These are some strange committees for this legislation to travel through. We better hope it's strange enough for this thing to die there.

This is not about anything but control of every single aspect of your life which, if this bill passes, includes how much your children weigh. This is simply none of the government's business. This is government in yet another attempt to subvert parental authority and gain another inroad into the most personal areas of our lives.

If Washington has all these billions of dollars just burning a hole in their proverbial pockets, and they truly want to try to do something about childhood obesity, then let's spend it on putting Physical Education back in this nation's schools as a required class, just like it used to be. The rest would be up to the parents. Learn the word "no" all over again. No to unhealthy foods. Make fast food, candies, cookies, cakes, ice cream and the like treats again instead of part of a child's daily intake. Keep government out of it. It may not result in the perfect Aryan race, but then, that was tried once before, wasn't it?